Another Brooklyn

“I lifted my head to look up into the changing leaves, thinking how at some point, we were all headed home. At some point, all of this, everything and everyone, became memory.”

Thus ends the hauntingly beautiful lyrical novel Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson. This was my first foray into Woodson’s work, and I have to admit, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d read that she was an amazing writer, and she has a National Book Award to prove it. Yet, I’d read other highly praised novels and been sorely disappointed. Not so with Another Brooklyn.

“The year my mother started hearing voices from her dead brother Clyde, my father moved my own brother and me from our SweetGrove land in Tennessee to Brooklyn.”

August, Gigi, Sylvia, and Angela are four young Black girls growing up in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York in the 1970s, and…